Active Listening Techniques

How to actually listen to other people.

Talk less and listen more. Ask questions instead of firing back your own opinion: ‘most people don’t listen, they reload.’

I'm more interested in the Cult of Listening.First you listen and really try to understand not only the what but why from the person you're having a conversation with.Then you paraphrase what you heard back to make sure you understand and that they can hear it back and agree.If you do these two things you'll find that most people are actually pretty reasonable and you can in turn have a reasoned and listened to response and, shockingly, a real conversation.

Fantastic essay. Listening in this way is an important part of Nonviolent Communication[1], which I'd highly recommend as further reading if this resonated with you.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

There are aspects of NVC that can apply. In particular, speak first with observations, in a manner that can be corrected. Once a dialogue is established, look for signals the other party is willing to receive feedback. Conversely, if they are not engaged, backoff politely.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Com...

You might want to checkout out NVC:https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/2019/03/06/want-to-impr...I found it through HN and for me, personally, it has helped.

gently disagree and propose that in the same way that they don’t hear you, you aren’t hearing them

it's not what you said, it's how you said it. If you want others to listen to you, I encourage you to find ways to express it in ways that they'll hear.

There’s a fantastic book and tv series by a research psychologist Brene Brown where she talks a lot about how to be on the listening end of these kinds of conversations. Often in these situations the other party just wants to have their emotions validated by someone they trust. Just being there to acknowledge their feelings and see their pain is enough (and trying to do more can sometimes make things worse). I highly recommend checking Brown out, she is quite incredible.

The best explanation I have seen comes from the book "Supercommunicators." The author says that it's not so much about the type of personality, but the type of conversation that's occurring. He says there are three main types of conversations, and problems happen when the people are having two different conversations. Here, you're talking about a "practical/problem-solving" conversation, and the other person might be having a "what are we feeli